From the course: Setting Up a Small-Office Network

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Understanding local storage and network-attached storage (NAS)

Understanding local storage and network-attached storage (NAS)

From the course: Setting Up a Small-Office Network

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Understanding local storage and network-attached storage (NAS)

In this section, I'd like to talk about some different storage options. In other words, what kind of hardware could we use to store our files. We have three main options, the first being direct-attached storage, DAS, network attached storage, NAS, or a storage area network, SAN, or usually pronounced "San". The first option, direct-attached storage, is usually called local storage, because it is local to one machine. This is very simply, one or more hard drives in a computer directly attached to that computer. Local storage is the cheapest, easiest option. Pretty much every computer you buy comes with at least one hard drive already in it, and it's fairly easy to add additional hard drives. However, this does not scale well. Every machine has a limit to how many hard drives we can put in it, and also if a machine isn't purpose-built for sharing files, there's going to be a limit to how much input and output that machine can take. The next option, network-attached storage, NAS…

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